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How To Manage Your Time Like An Architect
Whether or not you are studying architecture, learning to manage your time is crucial to becoming successful at whatever you are doing in life. You may be talented and creative but if you don’t know how to work efficiently, all your efforts will go to waste. Conversely, if you don’t consider yourself as the most skilled or talented, knowing how to be efficient with your time grants you the ability to fine tune your craft, and in this video, i will show you how to do just that.
Architects have to be really good at managing their time. Imagine this: a person contacts an architect to possibly commission them for the design of a building. After some conversation the potential client inquires about how long the type of building that he has requested would take design and construct. Now, buildings are very complicated things with many components so it is crucial that the architect has a way to create a detailed schedule and forecast the phases required to complete the project. It’s also important that the architect has an idea of how much time will be spent on each of these phases. Luckily architects have a tool called a Gantt Chart.
Simply put, a Gantt chart is a horizontal bar graph that subdivides a large task, (include a fun fact on screen about when it was invented) making it easier to plan and forecast the completion of it. Now Gantt Charts can be a little bit too formal for what we need in our everyday life, but it will be a good foundation for our own time management.
Now let’s look at you. Since this IS an architecture channel, Let’s say, for example, that you ARE studying architecture and you have a midterm coming up in exactly one month. The first thing you want to do is list all the components, or all the things that must be included for the midterm. For this example I'm going to say that we will need four floor plans, one for each level, four elevations, one for each facade, two building cross sections, 5 process models, one main model, precedent studies, site studies, sketches, one exterior and one interior rendering, all mounted on a 36 x 72 inch board.
Normally, a student might hear that and be like, oh, i got enough time, so i’m gonna keep on working on the design of my building. 2 weeks go by, the student feels like their design is still not strong, but now they only have a couple of weeks before their midterm presentation. Add a bunch of all nighters, stress and anxiety and everything starts to go downhill. Naturally they will rush doing whatever they have and at the end they have an incomplete board that looks horrible. We want to avoid that, right?
So i used to do this in my sketchbook all the time but eventually I found it was more efficient to create these tables on Excel instead; that being said, feel free to do this in your sketchbook at first. I went back and recreated a sample for you guys, so head over to my description and you can download a google sheet version of this table for free. Now let’s see how i made this and how you can use it for you tasks. Keep in mind that this example shows architecture school work, but you can use this for practically anything
*Switch over to the excel sheet*
Remember that this method is something that I developed throughout my years at school and it’s something that worked very well for me. What I recommend is that you try it out for a month or two, and see how it goes. As you go a long you might find ways to evolve this method and to make it more suitable for yo. The important thing though, is to always stay on top of your work, get really good at estimating how long certain tasks will take you and plan ahead to see how much time you will have available to dedicate to get those things done.
Before I end this video I wanted to mention that over the last few months, I've been getting a lot of requests to make Revit content. Rather than make videos on random Revit topics, I decided to make an online class that specifically teaches you how to use revit, even if you’ve never used the program before. I designed the program to go step by step, showing you how to go from nothing to a complete project including architectural sheets. So head over to my description and click the link to find out more about it. For those of you that are more advanced on Revit, the course will still benefit you because i’ll be uploading new lectures to it every week, so stay tuned for that.
As always, feel free to reach out with any questions you have, good luck, enjoy your studies, and I’ll see you down in the comments!
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